


if you had to choose, if you had to choose

by clandestinerabbit



Category: Girl Meets World
Genre: F/M, High School Angst, Post-Canon, Pre-Relationship, early application, life angst tbh, mostly they're just friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 04:48:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17822192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clandestinerabbit/pseuds/clandestinerabbit
Summary: Maya has a big decision to make, and Josh tries his best to help. There's only so much one guy can do when he doesn't have it figured out himself.





	if you had to choose, if you had to choose

“How did you choose your college?”

Josh looks up from his laptop to see Maya kneeling on the bench across the table from him, using her hands to hold her up as she leans forward with a certain amount of urgency. “Hello to you too,” he says as straight-faced as he can manage, “that door’s practically silent these days, isn’t it?”

She flaps one hand dismissively but doesn’t, to his surprise, provide the eyeroll he anticipated. “Yeah, hi, came in through the window. I don’t got a lot of time here, Matthews.”

“Why?”

“I _could_ tell you, but it’s probably more information than you want to know about your niece.” His eyes widen at the thought of all the things he doesn’t want to know about Riley, and she smacks her palm against the table to snap him out of it. “Earth to Boing.”

“Sorry,” he starts, blinking, “what was the question?”

Lowering herself to sit on the heels of her enormous shoes, she looks at him pityingly. “How. Did. You. Choose. Your. College?”

“NYU?”

She groans, putting her head in her hands. “And there is the result of a college education,” she says in her radio announcer voice, “young Joshua Matthews can’t understand a simple question! Why would Maya Hunter want to go at all?”

Her voice is silly, but her eyes are dead serious in the thirty seconds he meets them before she drops her gaze to the table, concentrating on the corner of the placemat as it lifts and falls under two paint-stained fingers. Josh jabs at his phone to check the date and double-checks it with the calendar on the wall, groaning as he sees the bright red note scrawled across the whiteboard: _COLLEGE APPLICATIONS!!! :D_ Knee-deep in his own last semester, he had totally forgotten what senior year of high school felt like: like time was disappearing faster than your phone battery when you streamed a Phillies game and you didn’t even know where to start looking for your charger. Every decision you made seemed like it changed the course of your whole life. When it was his senior year, Josh got to the point where he refused to choose between pancakes and French toast for breakfast, and he had it easy.

Tossing his pencil into the gutter of his textbook, he closes his computer and leans his chair back on two legs in an attempt to give her space. Good thing Topanga isn’t here, or she’d have his hide. “ _Do_ you want to go at all?” he asks, wanting to make sure they’re starting from the same place.

Some people don’t and honestly he kind of thought she’d be one of them. She’s got a little of Shawn’s wandering spirit and a whole lot of curiosity she hasn’t been able to satisfy here. But she nods her head, still looking at the table, and says “I need it to be better. Teaching myself only works so well. Plus”—she glances up at him quickly—“I’m a stayer.”

He’s not quite sure what all she means by that but he can tell it’s something important, so he nods easy acceptance. “Where are you applying?”

“Hey, this isn’t about me.”

“Sure it isn’t,” he says, fixing her with a look, and she bites her lip.

“Okay, well, maybe it is. But what schools I applied or got in to—”

“Got in?” he repeats. “Maya, that’s amazing!”

“No need to sound so surprised,” she says, her cheeks pinking. “I can do it if I try a little.”

“Yeah, no, of course you can. I just didn’t know you’d have heard.”

Folding her hands, she assumes a patient expression. “Well, Josh, there’s this little thing called early admission—”

“Maya,” he groans, and she stops with a grin. “Schools, though,” he continues, “as in more than one?”

“As in,” she nods, a little stunned.

The legs of his chair thump to the floor and he stops himself from grabbing her hand—technically it’s within their six weeks and allowed, but this isn’t that kind of conversation and he doesn’t want to make it be. “That’s _amazing_ ,” he says instead, hoping she can hear how much he means it. “And you’ve got options! That’s great.”

“No, that’s exactly the _problem_.” She leans forward on her elbows, demanding his undivided attention even though most of the time it’s hers for the taking. “My mom didn’t go to college, all right, and Dad says he just went where he could get in. I thought that would be me, and it’s not. I don’t know what to do with _options_.” Her nose wrinkles like it’s a bad smell. “How do you make a choice that decides your whole life?”

He can’t help the grin that blooms across his face at her desperate and inadvertent echo of his earlier thoughts but it’s the wrong thing to do, because her face falls and she whips up her defenses like _that_. “Never mind,” she says, starting to clamber to her feet, “of course it’s funny to someone with your level of maturity—”

“Maya, no.” He does reach out to snag her wrist then, and if she’s moving too fast and he catches her hand instead, he’s mature enough (and practiced enough) to ignore the vaguely electric shocks zipping up his arm. She looks down at their clasped hands, totally unreadable. And he’s pretty good at reading her by now. “I wasn’t laughing. Okay, I was, but only because I _totally_ remember that feeling.”

“You do?” she asks suspiciously from under her eyelashes.

“Yeah. I think everybody does.”

“Nope,” she says, popping the p, “I asked Mr. Matthews and he said it was easy because he went where Dad did.”

Josh believes that and says so. “But Topanga got into Yale and still ended up at Pennbrook. _Yale_. You think that wasn’t hard for her?”

Maya sighs and throws one leg over the bench, plopping down like the saddest clown at the rodeo. “I know it was, ’cause I asked her too. She said it was scary, but she knew she wanted to be with Mr. Matthews more than anything else.” Tossing him a side-long, dangerous smirk, she adds, “now, if you were going to still be there it would be easy, but. . .”

He suddenly realizes they’re still holding hands across the table—wow, he has _got_ to be better about noticing that—and he uncurls his fingers to pull away (but slowly, so it doesn’t hurt her feelings). “Too bad I would still graduate even if I flunked all my classes this semester. Which I’m not going to.”

“You couldn’t try, just for me?” She bats her eyelashes demurely and gives a sharp flash of a grin at his laugh before slumping over to pillow her head on her arms. “Tell me what to doooo.”

“I can’t do that, Maya.”

“Well”—she raises her head two inches and huffs—“make use of these all-important three years and give me some advice, then. No one else has said anything useful so far, and you always do.”

Her faith in him warms his heart a little, but it also kind of freaks him out. Like he’s got this #adulting thing any more locked down? If anything, he only knows how totally clueless he is. It’s a lame truth, but it’s the only thing he’s got to offer. “I don’t know.”

She looks at him blankly. “You don’t know. . . anything? You got nothin’ at all?”

“No,” he says honestly, “not about that. NYU wasn’t a hard choice for me.”

“Why?” she wails, and he isn’t sure if the question’s directed at him or the universe but he decides she’ll get a quicker answer from him.

“I knew what I wanted: to go away, to be near my brothers, to go to a school with a good reputation and a lot of majors in case I changed my mind. Which was good, because I did.”

“Well aren’t you just lucky, that one place fulfills all your deepest desires?”

“Yeah,” he admits, “and that I got in, and got scholarships, and. . .”

“What would you have done if there wasn’t one school that did that? What if you had to choose?”

She goes back to flicking at the corner of the placemat but she doesn’t look away, which is something he’s always admired about her. Whatever else her crappy life did to her, it also made her brave enough to meet it head-on. Such courage deserves more than a halfway-decent answer, so he slumps back in his chair and holds her gaze as he thinks. It doesn’t take him as long as he expects. “I would have decided what was most important and gone with that. That’s what Cory and Topanga told you, too, really. You have to choose what will help you get what you most want.”

“And what if you make the wrong choice?”

“Who said there’s a wrong choice?”

Her eyes go wide and she turns her sputter into a scoff, like he’s trying to fool her and she’s not falling for it. Crossing his arms, he leans forward to wait until she’s willing to listen. There’s no point in arguing if she’s too skeptical to hear. She catches his attitude and copies it, though there’s still something twitchy in the way her fingers drum against her arm. “There’s always a wrong choice. Usually it’s the one I make.”

He knows that’s not as true as she likes to pretend, but he lets it pass to fight out another day. “Is there a wrong choice between tacos and smoothies?”

“Why choose between tacos and smoothies?” she gasps.

“You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I do.” She frowns, staring at a spot over his shoulder. “Well...I guess it just depends on what you want more. Both taste good and fill your stomach. There’s probably something about vitamins and health, blah blah blah, but really, you can’t go wrong either way.” Spreading his hands, he silently presents her with the obvious conclusion. “No,” she says quickly, shaking her head, “because you can have a taco one day and a smoothie the next. Picking a college is like picking only tacos or smoothies for the rest of your life.”

“No, it’s really not. If you buy a taco and then decide you want a smoothie instead, or, gosh, chili cheese fries, you can dump the taco and get it. Topanga didn’t graduate from Pennbrook _or_ Yale.”

Maya’s voice is low and wary, but she can’t hide the hope that hides beneath it. “She didn’t?”

“She left there after a couple years and went to NYU Law School.” His eyebrows draw together. “She didn’t tell you that? Huh. That’s an uncharacteristic slip-up. Well, we can’t all be perfect.”

“I wouldn’t go straight to perfect,” she says. “If you were actually perfect you wouldn’t be three years older than me.”

“If I wasn’t three years older than you I wouldn’t have all this wisdom to offer.”

“What wisdom? All you’ve done so far is make me crave tacos. In fact, to make it up to me I think you’d better take me to tacos.”

She’s just saying it out of habit, and he knows it—it’s kind of their thing—but he also knows if he responds like he usually does she’ll slip back behind her goofy voices and over-dramatics and he won’t know if he actually helped her or made it worse, and that matters to him. Tacos tiptoe precariously close to a date, and he knows that too, and he actually doesn’t care. “Sure,” he says, standing up and shutting his book over the pencil, “Paco’s?”

“Wait.” She turns, watching him walk to the coat hooks to retrieve his jacket and hat. “Are you serious?”

“As a heart attack.” He plucks a scarf for himself and another one for her, holding it out to her with a shrug. “Friends can have tacos. You seem like you need them. My stuff can wait.”

“Okay,” she says, “okay. Let me just text Riley so she doesn’t freak out.”

As expected, Riley sends Maya a total of seventeen emoji-filled text messages during the elevator ride alone. Josh does his best not to peek at the words but he can’t help noticing the hearts.

Huddled into scarves and coat collars against the mid-January weather, they don’t talk on the way there. He feels almost too cold to think anything more than “don’t make this weird, man” so it surprises him as much as her when they’re sitting at a barely-clean table with fourteen tacos between them and the words suddenly appear, spilling out as polished as if he gave them a rough and final draft. “You know, you can get what you want wherever you go. We all act like college is this huge thing that determines the kind of person you’ll be forever, and it is, but it’s also not? You decide what kind of experience you have and how it shapes you. It’s not like any two people have the same experience even at the same college. Or in the same major. Or the same room. You think Shnoopaloop and I are the same person?”

“Believe me, if I did, I wouldn’t have let you buy me eight tacos.”

He refuses to let her derail this (actually important) train of thought. “You’ve been in enough classes with Cory to pick up some stuff, even if you don’t listen on purpose—what’s the secret of life?”

“People change people,” she says quietly, like the words will break if she says them any louder.

“You’re people too, Maya. You’re not a sailboat that goes wherever the wind blows it. Wherever you go, whatever you do, in the end you’ll get exactly what is most important to you, because it’s _your_ experience that _you_ make happen.”

She looks at him for a long moment, expressionless, unblinking. With anyone else he would be uncomfortable, but he’s known her long enough that he just looks back, watching her throw open her gates to let his words in, daring her to actually believe them. It’s always fascinated him that someone so dynamic is at her realest when she’s most still, and he’s privileged to be trusted enough to see her at her most defenseless. Taking a breath, she curves her mouth into a tiny, slightly breathless smile. “Thank you, Josh. That was actually really wise.”

Now he knows she’s heard, he steps back—they can’t stay too long at the depths, or they get the bends when they inevitably have to rush back up to surface-level conversations. “You’re welcome. But actually most of that came from Feeny.”

Unwrapping a taco, she rolls her eyes. “Ugh, why do all the men I know want to be Feeny? Even Farkle wants to be Feeny, he just doesn’t want to wear the sweaters.”

“I would pay good money to see that.”

“Josh.”

He looks up from carefully folding his taco to find her staring at hers.

“How do you know what the most important thing is?”

The question of the century, he thinks with resignation, and throws up a helpless hand. “I’ll let you know when I find out.”

“What?” Her taco drops from her hand and opens, scattering lettuce and cheese. “You don’t know? I thought college was supposed to help you figure it all out!”

“Not at all.”

“You mean I gotta do this again in four years?”

“Maybe not if you’re lucky. But if you aren’t—” He puts a napkin in her hand. “Well, I’ll still be three years ahead, ready to offer helpful advice.”

She narrows her eyes and begins brushing up her mess, balling up the napkin when most of it’s picked up and returning to her taco. “To recap: you’re saying that it doesn’t matter, tacos or smoothies, because I taste what I want whatever I actually eat, and because I’m just going to be hungry again later anyway?”

“The metaphor falls apart sometime.”

“Oh, that one crashed and burned.”

“You know what, I’m sorry I bought you tacos.”

“No you’re not.”

“No,” he admits, “I’m not.”

She gets that mischievous, _I’m getting away with something_ look in her eye. “Well I do decla-yuh, but it does seem like someone’s just moved their piece ahead on the game board!”

“Friends can buy friends tacos,” he mumbles, feeling his carefully maintained coolness evaporate in the heat racing up the back of his neck.

Of course she offers no relief. “I can’t help but notice,” she says oh-so-casually, “that it’ll be three years _ahead_ , not three years _older_.”

“I know what I said.”

“Well?” She raises both eyebrows, amused and expectant.

“Well,” he says, rising to her dare, “we’ll see, won’t we?”

She holds out her still-uneaten taco like it’s a glass for a toast. “I’m going to hold you to that, Uncle Boing.”

He picks up his own taco and bumps it gently against hers, a seal and a promise. “I didn’t really think you would do anything else.”


End file.
